On Loss

These last few weeks, my heart has been full. Death as a matter of course makes us examine our own lives, to draw warm things and people nearer to our hearts. In realizing the fragility of others, we hew to patterns of comfort; we take time to stop and count each moment as a blessing. We tell ourselves that this has changed everything, though we will forget this lesson soon enough. Unthinkingly, we will return to our daily procrastinations, even while those closest to the loss cannot.

The familiar heft of that feeling sticks in my chest, though my copy of it is old and worn.

 As I stand at the outskirts of that pain, it seems unfair to feel grief when the full magnitude has only hit me in the smallest of ripples. But still, there it is: a flood of memory, and gratitude, and sadness; of anger, that the world should be upended upon two people so dearly, wonderfully kind. Of that overwhelming feeling of wanting to do, when there is nothing to be done.

And so I turn to the things that I can. To my husband, who makes tea and holds my hand without my asking. To my ratlings, who are jolly and round, and who cheer me up just by existing. To wool and words, as in my incapacity to do I can still retreat into the methodical and the generative, in the perhaps vain hope that by makeshift cloth and love, I might protect all of our hearts.